Dutch Post-Impressionist Painter, 1853-1890 Vincent Willem van Gogh (30 March 1853 ?C 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist artist. Some of his paintings are now among the world's best known, most popular and expensive works of art. Van Gogh spent his early adult life working for a firm of art dealers. After a brief spell as a teacher, he became a missionary worker in a very poor mining region. He did not embark upon a career as an artist until 1880. Initially, Van Gogh worked only with sombre colours, until he encountered Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism in Paris. He incorporated their brighter colours and style of painting into a uniquely recognizable style, which was fully developed during the time he spent at Arles, France. He produced more than 2,000 works, including around 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches, during the last ten years of his life. Most of his best-known works were produced in the final two years of his life, during which time he cut off part of his left ear following a breakdown in his friendship with Paul Gauguin. After this he suffered recurrent bouts of mental illness, which led to his suicide. The central figure in Van Gogh's life was his brother Theo, who continually and selflessly provided financial support. Their lifelong friendship is documented in numerous letters they exchanged from August 1872 onwards. Van Gogh is a pioneer of what came to be known as Expressionism. He had an enormous influence on 20th century art, especially on the Fauves and German Expressionists.  Related Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh :. | Still life:Pink Roses in a Vase (nn04) | Vase with Gladioli (nn04) | Sunflowers ww | Still life with French Novels and a Rose (nn04) | Pollard Willows (nn04) |
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Elmer Wachtel
American Painter, 1864-1929
Mariotto Albertinelli
(October 13, 1474 - November 5, 1515) was a High Renaissance Italian painter of the Florentine school, closely involved with Fra Bartolomeo and influenced by Raphael. He was born in Florence. Already as a 12-year old boy, he became a pupil of Cosimo Rosselli, and a fellow-pupil with Fra Bartolomeo with whom he formed such an intimate brotherly rapport that in 1494 the two started their own studio in Florence. Vasari's opinion was that Mariotto was not so well grounded in drawing as Bartolomeo, and he tells that, to improve his hand he had taken to drawing the antiquities in the Medici garden, where he was encouraged by Madonna Alfonsina, the mother of Duke Lorenzo II de' Medici. When the Medici were temporarily banished in 1494, he returned to his friend, whose manner he copied so assiduously, according to Vasari, that his works were taken for Baccio's. When, in the wake of Savonarola's morality campaign, Baccio joined the Dominican order as Fra Bartolomeo in 1500 and gave up painting, Albertinelli, beside himself with the loss, would have joined him; but, spurred by his success in completing an unfinished Last Judgment of Bartolomeo's, he resolved to carry on alone. Among his many students were Jacopo da Pontormo, Innocenzo di Pietro Francucci da Imola and Giuliano Bugiardini. Mariotto was a most restless person and carnal in the affairs of love and apt to the art of living, and, taking a dislike to the studies and brain-wracking necessary to painting, being also often stung by the tongues of other painters, as is their way, he resolved to give himself to a less laborious and more jovial profession, and so opened the most lovely hostelry outside the Porta San Gallo, and at the sign of the Dragon at the Ponte Vecchio a tavern and inn. This life he led for many months, saying that he had taken up an art that was without muscles, foreshortening or perspective and, better still, without faultfinding, and that the art that he had given up imitated flesh and blood, but this one created flesh and blood; in this if you had good wine you heard yourself praised, but in that every day you were blamed. But at last the low life became an annoyance to him, and, filled with remorse, he returned to painting.
joseph michael gandy
Joseph Michael Gandy (1771 - 1843) was an English artist, visionary architect and architectural theorist, most noted for his imaginative paintings depicting Sir John Soane's architectural designs. He worked extensively with Soane both as draughtsman and creative partner from 1798 until 1809 when he (ultimately unsuccessfully) set up his own practice. Gandy built little in his career, having a reputation as a difficult individual to deal with. However his work included the Phoenix Fire and Pelican Life Insurance Offices (1804?C1805, destroyed ca. 1920) in London, Doric House at Sion Hill in Bath (1818), and the remodelling of Swerford Park house in Oxfordshire (1824?C1829). Commercially he was a failure and served two terms in a debtors' prison, but his published and exhibited work was largely a critical and popular success. In 1821 he published two articles in the Magazine of Fine Arts on The Philosophy of Architecture. He intended to expand upon this subject in an eight-volume work entitled Art, Philosophy and Science of Architecture, of which his unpublished manuscript survives. His paintings show a dramatic use of two-point perspective and architectural precision, and also reflect his (and Soane's) fascination with Roman ruins. His architectural fantasies owe a clear debt to Piranesi and play upon historical, literary and mythological themes with a feeling for the sublime that is the equal of his contemporaries J. M. W. Turner and John Martin. He died in a private asylum in Devon where he had been placed by his family in 1839. Many of his paintings can be seen in the Pictures Room of Sir John Soane's Museum in London.